The Shadow at the Gate

by Christopher Bunn

  “Who’ll buy fine linens? Who’ll buy?”

  “Wards! Wards for sale!”

  “Cakes, cakes, cakeses!”

  “Fortunes!”

  A mist drifted down upon them as they walked by the fountain. The wihht was silent at his side. The falling water glimmered with dark colors. There were purples and blues quivering within the water and Nio could see the same colors leaping in the flames of the nearest lamp.

  “Cakeses!”

  And then they were at the steps rising up to the chained doors of the university. The place was a looming mass of stone and shadow hulking on the edge of the square. People sat on the steps, resting from their shopping, their thieving—resting their feet and chattering like the sparrows that made their nests in the eaves overhead. The last few steps, however, were unoccupied.

  The little door to the left of the chained entrance opened at Nio’s word. The wihht slipped in after him. The door closed and its ward whispered back into watchfulness. They stood in silence in the great entrance hall. Nio closed his eyes and let his mind drift. He could taste dust in the air. There. A spark of life. He caught at someone’s thoughts. The slightest touch of surprise quivered in the other’s mind and then it was abruptly closed to him.

  He opened his eyes and waited.

  It was only a matter of minutes before he heard the sound of approaching feet. A glow of light grew far down the passage on the right. The shape of a short little man drew closer, hurrying along with a candle wavering in his hand. He paused at the entrance to the hall.

  “Ablendan.”

  “Nio.” The little man’s eyes flicked to the wihht and then back. “Did you—were you looking for someone? I felt your mind pass by. Who’s this?”

  “An old friend visiting the city for the festival. We were students together at the stone tower.”

  “Ah,” said Ablendan. He took a step forward. The candle in his hand seemed to brighten, but the shadows in the hall deepened in response. “Then I imagine he’ll be safe enough in here.”

  “Yes.”

  At his side, Nio sensed the wihht’s body tense. He could feel the creature’s hunger—a spark of greed that threatened to burst into ravening lust. He snapped a silent command at the wihht.

  No.

  And to his surprise, a thought pushed back at him.

  But this one will please me.

  No.

  “Did you say something?” asked Ablendan. He shuffled his feet, eyes again sliding over to the wihht. The candle wavered in his hand.

  “No,” said Nio, stepping closer. “Is Severan near?” He spoke quickly, for he could see suspicion surfacing in Ablendan’s eyes. “I’d like to introduce my friend to him, as they both shared the distinction of solving the yearly riddle Eald Gelaeran set for the students. In my year it was never solved.”

  “Mine either,” returned the other. His face cleared and he grinned. “We always thought old Gelaeran posed riddles without solutions. Ours was that old chestnut—can there be shadow if there’s no light?”

  “Which has never been answered to anyone’s satisfaction. The riddle during my year was supposedly first asked by Staer Gemyndes himself. Where did the men of Harlech come from, and why is it that the ghosts in that land never rest in the earth?”

  “I’ve heard that asked, but not in the stone tower. Hmm—yes, where was it? Was it during the—”

  “Is Severan here?” asked Nio again.

  “Oh—yes, of course. He’s down in the mosaic chamber, trying to find some—something he lost. I’m off to the tower library. I expect you can find your own way.”

  “Yes, I can,” said Nio.

  The long hall was dark, despite the windows lining the west wall. Nio could see the moon, a sliver of silver ghosting through the sky. The wihht stirred behind him. Nio muttered a word—light—were light and heat and color always going to be so necessary? Surely the cold space between the stars was lovelier and more interesting than the stars themselves. But for now he still needed light to see with. He spoke the word again and fire arced through the hall, separating into tongues of flame that hung in the air like a line of torches.

  “Don’t tread on the blue tiles,” he said to the wihht.

  They stepped through the door at the far end of the hall. Unbidden, the wihht paused and seemed to disappear into the darkness. Light shone deep within the stairwell leading down into the chamber below. Nio let his mind feather out into the stillness. There. He recoiled and then drifted back, testing delicately.

  “Severan,” he said.

  No one answered. He could sense the wihht near him, but only as a hunger, a void that sought to be filled. The silence continued unbroken, but there was a tautness to it that spoke of awareness. The stairwell spiraled around him as he descended the stone steps down toward the light. An oil lamp burned in the middle of the chamber floor.

  “Severan.”

  Nio paused on the last step. In the ceiling above, the huge mosaic shifted with strange colors and shapes that suggested forgotten things teetering on the edge of remembrance. Dreams and nightmares fading at the moment of waking. Words lost on the tips of tongues. The touch of tattered silk draped on dead hands. He could taste the fifth name of darkness in his mouth. The lamplight wavered.

  “There’s so much memory in this place,” said Severan’s voice from somewhere in the room. He spoke so quietly that Nio had to strain to hear.

  “Farmers, lords, ladies, kings, merchants, craftsmen. They came here for hundreds and hundreds of years—from each duchy of Tormay. Even the men of Harlech.”

  “And the wizards,” said Nio.

  “And the wizards. All knowledge was esteemed, whether it was the humble art of the potter shaping clay, the machinations of the king’s mind unraveling the fortunes of land and people, or the old languages devolving backward into increasing rarity and power as they approached the language of creation itself.”

  High above, the mosaic swirled in response to the old man’s voice. The tiny stones rearranged themselves around each other and then settled, waiting patiently for whatever might be said next.

  “One of the oldest strictures of learning is that all knowledge, no matter how humble, is part of the same whole. Everything learned is another strand to be woven into the tapestry portraying the final truth. Not is the final truth, mind you, but a depiction. Mortal eye has yet to see it, though surely there’s a room somewhere in the house of dreams where the complete tapestry hangs. And past that room, perhaps there are other rooms in which hang other tapestries? But those aren’t for us.”

  “And what of the darkness?” said Nio. He spoke as softly as he could, as if loud words would shatter the quiet into something that could never be mended.

  “What of it?”

  “Isn’t knowledge of the darkness part of that same whole?”

  “I don’t know,” said the other. His voice sounded tired. “Though I’m certain the things of light can be inferred by the darkness, for the shape of shadow only exists out of opposition to the light.”

  “Not so. The darkness can create. Perhaps, one day, we’ll understand that light is only the shadow cast by darkness.”

  There was a long pause at that point. The lamplight dimmed and the colors of the mosaic dulled into muteness. Then, Severan spoke again.

  “I was afraid you’d say something like that.”

  Now.

  The wihht blurred past Nio. It was utterly silent. Part of him was shocked by the speed of the thing. It has grown, he thought. Grown into something I do not understand. But I can control it. I possess the fifth name of darkness.

  “Beorht scir!”

  Severan’s voice rang out. Instantly, the chamber blazed with radiance. The mosaic flared white-hot. The light was savage, incomprehensible in its totality. Nio staggered back against the steps, his hands flung to his face, but seared behind his eyelids was the huge red blot of the mosaic like some gigantic sun. Under its merciless light stood the stark, dark form o
f the wihht stunned into momentary stone. For a second Nio could not think—the light had pushed everything else from his mind—and then he found a word on his tongue, but it was too late. Someone brushed by him. Footsteps clattered up the stairs.

  “Dimnes!”

  The light faded down into shadow. The mosaic darkened and he could see again. The wihht snarled in fury. It rushed past him and up the stairwell. He turned to follow. He was tired. There was no longer any chance for the wihht to catch Severan, not in the labyrinthine sprawl of the ruins. The university was endless. The halls stretched farther than the memory of any man alive.

  He reached the door to see the blue dogs rise up out of the warded tiles around the wihht. Jaws gaped and teeth gleamed in the moonlight. The beasts lunged. But instead of torn limbs—how would one tear darkness and water?—the dogs passed harmlessly through the creature, as if the flesh they sought had become only vapor. The form of the wihht wavered in their passing; arms, legs, and torso eddied into a confusion of lines that no longer had much resemblance to a human shape. The dogs skidded on the tiles, scrabbling to gain purchase to turn and lunge again.

  Three times the beasts passed through the wihht, jaws snapping futilely, until they learned from their disappointment and contented themselves with circling it, fur bristling across their hackles. It was an odd sight, for as the dogs and the wihht moved further away, they became insubstantial in the pale moonlight streaming through the windows. They looked like a swirl of shadows tinged with blue and flecked at intervals with flashes of white fangs and glaring eyes.

  They disappeared into the gloom at the far end of the hall. After several minutes, the dogs came back. The beast in front sighted Nio standing at the door. Its ears pricked up and all the dogs quickened their pace as if their leader had silently communicated to them the prospect of a new quarry. But they had no chance to try their teeth, for they vanished, one by one, like candle flames flickering out. Where each dog had been, a blue vapor drifted down into the tiles below. The room stretched empty before Nio. When he came to the entrance hall, he found the wihht waiting.

  “Come,” he said.

  Outside the university, the city still thronged with people. Never before had Nio seen it so. Mioja Square swayed with movement, as if the sea had overthrown the shore and now flowed through every alley and street. These were not people and barrow carts and the pitched tents of the fair. No—rather, this was a strange tide, the peaks of waves made of sloping canvas angling down into troughs swirling with swaths of heads—white eyes and white teeth gleaming in the lamplight like foam. There—that was no fat, bearded merchant draped in brown velvet, but rather a whiskered seal diving in search of fish. This was no jeweled lady with her gauzy garments but some strange jellyfish glistening with watery colors and tentacles floating around her like a silken shawl.

  The voices of the people no longer made sense to him. Words were only formless noises that lapped against each other. He blinked and tried to focus his attention but he still only heard a liquid babble of confusion. He was tired, he knew that, but perhaps he was even more tired than he thought.

  And who is to say that this is not how language will end some day? A passage from a book drifted through his mind. One language marked the beginning, before things began. One language did Anue speak from the house of dreams. From this one language did all languages descend. Do not listen to the fools who say that all things seen descended in this manner. Things seen are only the form of truth, but the one language is truth itself.

  But for how long could languages evolve and further evolve until they lost all meaning? That was the curse of the wizards and scholars, and it only increased with each succeeding generation. As time passed, it became more difficult to discover words from the ancient languages and near impossible to find even a single syllable from the oldest language of all. Perhaps this meaningless wash around him, this inarticulate murmur of the sea that seemed to eddy from the mouths of the crowd around him was the fate of language?

  Sharp in the air, he breathed the odor of brine and kelp and all the wet, hidden things of the sea. The scent startled him and the face of the girl floated up through his thoughts—the farmer’s daughter. Her name was lost to his memory, but the fifth name of darkness turned within his mind, and that one word was more valuable than all the names and all the words of a dozen lost languages. Her name did not matter anymore. The wihht walked behind him. It did not make a single sound and, for a while, Nio forgot its existence.

  The instant the manor doors shut behind them, there was only silence. He could no longer smell the sea. The wihht did not wait for his command but turned and shambled away down the hall, to the kitchen beyond and, past that, to the cellar below. How odd. Not a word about its hunger. Not even a protest about the failed opportunity with Severan.

  Nio paused for a moment. Absentmindedly, he commanded the sconces on the wall to light and they flickered into soft glows. I could use a bite myself, he thought. Half a loaf of stale bread sat on the kitchen table. He knew there were onions in the wicker basket in the corner, but the thought of food vanished as quickly as it had arrived. The door to the cellar was open. He tiptoed silently down the steps. Halfway down, he stopped.

  The cellar was as dark as usual. Oddly enough, despite the lack of light, he could see quite well. Below, in the center of the floor, was the wihht. The creature was crouched by the drain hole with its head bent down. As Nio stood in silence, there came to his ears a faint sound—a muttering noise of strange words. It was a whisper, hissed in some unknown tongue. There was a tone of supplication in the sound, as if the wihht begged some favor of the darkness within the drain hole. The whisper paused, and Nio found himself straining to listen for an answer to the wihht, but there was nothing to hear except the beating of his own heart. After a moment, the creature whispered again, but the supplication was gone from its voice. Horror fell over Nio and he turned, blundering up the stairs and not caring if the wihht heard the clatter of his sudden retreat.

  He fled, not thinking of anything except the dread choking his mind. The house was no longer familiar to him. Passages led in strange directions, angling back upon themselves so that he found himself stumbling through rooms he had just left. Staircases tilted underneath him, and more than once he found himself running down rather than up. He could not find the front door.

  I’ll unmake this place, he thought savagely. I know the fifth name of darkness. Unmake it into shadow, these stones and wood and walls, until there is nothing here except darkness. There will not be even a memory of this place. I’ll walk away. Unmake the wihht. I’ll walk away from it all. North. Maybe she’s still alive.

  He tried to smile. His face was a stiff mask of fear with bared teeth and wide eyes. The fifth name of darkness teetered on the edge of his thoughts. But his tongue would not remember the name. He clamped his mouth shut on the scream threatening to break forth instead, lurched down a hall, and pushed through a door.

  The library. This place was familiar. The shelves rose around him in confirmation of all he had studied, all he had learned, all he knew and was. The precious books bought, stolen, begged, traded, and hunted down in every corner of Tormay. The histories written by his predecessors, anthologies of lore and suspect tales, dissertations on arcane subjects and even stranger minutiae, collections of words of power, of dubious power, of no power at all—the works of men and women long dead, fallen to the shadow or safely sleeping within the house of dreams. All of this was his strength.

  His breathing slowed.

  Nio found himself standing in the alcove, staring at the painting of Scuadimnes, the treacherous archivist of the university. The old wizard’s eyes stared back at him.

  “Why did you do it?” Nio said aloud.

  Why did you?

  “It was never a question of why. There was no single moment. It was a progression of events. The little things. They happened.”

  Ahh. The little things.

  “You think a man wake
s up one morning and turns his mind to the Dark?”

  No. But he wakes up one morning and knows.

  “And how did you know?”

  The painting smiled.

  You would not know the words.

  And at that—at that thought of ‘word’—the fifth name of darkness sprang back into Nio’s mind, as complete as eyes closed in the dead of night.

  “I have it!” he said triumphantly.

  The painting said nothing but only nodded.

  Behind him, a door opened. Nio turned. The wihht stood there. It spoke in a voice that sounded like his own.

  “One wizard will do just as well as another.”

  “I made you,” said Nio coldly, unafraid with the name trembling and jittering and shuddering in his mind as if it were impatient for its own articulation. “I can unmake you.”

  “No.” And the creature reached for him with one, impossibly long arm.

  The man quickly stepped back and spoke the fifth name of darkness. He spoke it with relief, glad to have the weight of it taken from him, fiercely glad to see the wihht unmade. But the wihht continued to reach for him, still made, still composed of too solid flesh. Its hand reached him and took him by the throat. He spoke the name one more time. Shouted it desperately.

  “You will be unmade! This is the fifth name of darkness!”

  The wihht smiled and spoke, its grip tightening.

  “Yes, but it is also my name.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE HAWK AND THE OLD MEN

  Severan hurried along. A glimmer of light floated above his shoulder, illuminating the corridor. Dust rose in the wake of his passing. As he neared a door, a ward spelled into the handle became aware of him, the invisible strands weaving themselves into defensive readiness. Absentmindedly, he negated the spell without even thinking of the fire that would have met an unwary intruder.

  “Foro.”

  Be still.

  Be still. I have no quarrel with this place or the dreams of your long-dead masters. Be still.